Playing Fair and Being Kind

I had a phone conversation with one of my favorite people tonight. Our mutual respect and love lends itself to confessional type sharing. The concept of the brain as a collection of distracting memories that resemble the noises of a haunted house came up. We had fun playing with the comparison. This piece I have included below is a result of our shared experience, mostly mine though. I hope you enjoy it.

THE DARK of MY HAUNTED HOUSE

I sometimes feel like I live in a haunted house. I’m not talking about the shack I call home; this structure that squats here along the back road that shelters me and my belongings. I am speaking of the skull that contains the brain I use to fear and wonder and stare out of through the eyes on the front of it. What I see with my eyes does not always hold my attention. There are things that go on inside my head that deserve my attention as well. While I am watching or examining the life in front of me there is a collection of squeaks and groans going on continually just back of my eyes.

The house I grew up in was very much a haunted house according to my sister and mother. They both saw things in the night that they swore were only caused by spirit. My sister witnessed a red fog spiriting about on the second floor near my father’s bedroom. My mother experienced my dead father opening her bedroom door and signaling to her that there was a fire in the basement, which there was. When she rushed to open the door of her bedroom it was locked. She always locked the door when she was asleep after he died.

When I was a young boy I spent some nights alone in the house and I was always a little scared because of the size and age of the structure. The house had a full basement and there were three floors above that. There were eleven rooms. The ground floor had a large kitchen, a dining room, and two front rooms we called the sitting room and the music room. The middle floor contained a bathroom and four bedrooms. The top floor was attic like but was finished with three bedrooms. It was a very large house and when I spent the nights alone as a young boy I stayed in my bedroom on the top floor. The house was like a living and breathing thing when I was alone. Things creaked and made bumps and moans. I got used to it.

When I think of how my brain is like a haunted house I use my experiences in that house I grew up in to compare. The memories that are disturbing to me are the noises of the night in my head. What I look at through my eyes are that which is present and living but those small, disturbing memories continually try to distract and interrupt. There are those doors slamming and windows rattling, floors and stairs creaking away, way back there in my skull and I feel like the inside of my head is as large and as old as that old house I grew up in. I feel like I live in a haunted house. And I do.

G. M. Goodwin

1 January 2016